It’s Friday, the Mormon Day of Atonement and, traditionally, a time for the rest of us to consider man and his relationship to the sublime. There are two ways to look at the subject: either you think some genius woke up one morning, impaled a piece of Wonder Bread on a toy robot and strode purposefully into his yard, or you think that picture is the result of several trials with different foods and different pointy things. Here at Combat! blog, we maintain the illusion of divine inspiration. Really we have to do things the hard way, though, and on Friday we gather all the various internet gems that turned out to lack the fascinating luster of, say, a child’s board game. So sit back, turn on your cell phone camera, jam a piece of melba toast down on whatever body part seems like it will best support it, and wait for the magic to happen.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A little perspective on this socialism thing

Oh, Internet. Will your trenchant political commentary never cease?
First of all, whoever Photoshopped the popular web meme on the left to create the much-more-popular-with-me web meme on the right is a genius—in that he has repurposed a brutally stupid image in order to indict brutality—and less than a genius in that he seems to have been unable to match one of the world’s most common fonts. Good work anyway, dude. Second of all, “socialism” is rapidly overtaking “love” on the list of words most terribly abused by contemporary discourse. Accusations of socialism have dogged the Obama administration, whose decisions to take ownership stakes in GM, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have outraged Republicans, who believe the federal government should only have ownership stakes in, um, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GOP isn’t the only powerful voting bloc that’s concerned. Among retards, socialism has become synonymous with totalitarian government, as one attendee at congressman Brian Baird’s health care town hall reminds us. “The Nazis were the National Socialist Party,” he says. “They were leftists.”
Nerds of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bags of holding.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFIWUYr0n10
That’s a clip from Mazes and Monsters, the made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks, created to exploit the widespread (okay, pretty narrowly spread) fear that Dungeons & Dragons would make kids commit suicide and/or worship Satan. It was the eighties; everything was going to make kids commit suicide and worship Satan. Remember “Suicide Submission,” and the culture that briefly took Judas Priest seriously? The 700 Club was full of reports of kids all across America who became level 20 magic-users and killed themselves thinking they would achieve immortality, or sacrificed their little brothers to get the ingredients necessary for Power Word: Kill. It turned out that was like, two kids, but the message was disseminated nonetheless: Dungeons & Dragons will make your kid insane.
“First you start out with two thousand and a car”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjMJ6bGXm38
Ah, the three major elements of the human condition: auto ownership, college, and revenge. In addition to providing an occasion for an eleven-year-old child to say, “Pay me!” directly into the camera, this Parker Brothers commercial from the late sixties documents a culture struggling to articulate its new conception of, um, life. I played a lot of Life in the eighties—probably because, as a child, actual life was unavailable to me—and I remember thinking that it was an especially modern development. What other decade would invent a game for kids in which the players arbitrarily lose large sums of money in the stock market? While Candyland whisks you away to a magical land made of sugar and colors, and Chutes & Ladders postulates a physical universe made entirely of slides, the first thing you do in Life is get a job. It’s as if the adults working at Parker Brothers so resented children that they vowed to make them worry about paying bills and providing for other, imaginary children during playtime. And let me tell you, they did a terrific job.
Pamela Pilger: Sayin’ stuff
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVS4Zgjm8HE
You have to wait for it, but it’s worth it. The woman who yells “Heil Hitler” at the :36 mark of this video in order to keep an Israeli man from talking about universal health care is named Pamela Pilger. The look of terror on her face at :58, when A) she has had some time to consider what she just did and B) she has to participate in a discussion rather than yelling whatever shocking remarks she can think of from the periphery, is priceless. Also, if you pause the video, you will notice that she is wearing an Israeli Defense Force t-shirt.*

